In this post, I would like to feature my husband's art. If you know him, you know he's an unbelievable musician- both a composer and instrumentalist, with a critical ear and taste for many kinds of music. BUT, being the son of two artists, he has a creative artistic ability in visual art as well as musical art.

When I was studying art in college, us poor art students were relegated to a not so cozy place on the very far edge of the university campus called the Art Barn. That building had been many other business previously before being taken over by the university. Before it became the Art Barn it was a gaming room. Imagine in your head walking through double doors into a room the size of a small house with rotting wood, resident racoons and very high loft ceilings. The studio painters had some desk areas on the left half of the room, allotting about 6 feet a person, more or less, a stool, an easel, and if you were lucky, a table. The right side of the room was for classes (only 1 at a time) and had 30 or so stools and about 5 folding tables, a wall of cubby units for art work, some weird old lockers, and a crooked white board on which you could see remnants of past lectures and drawings from who knows how long ago. There was a wash room that smelled like moldy water, acrylic paint and turpentine containers on the floor, and through the connecting hallway were the printmaking rooms and sculpture workshop (why we had one of these, I don't know, because I never heard of a sculpture class there). Then in a small corner room was a desk and a cacophony of books, old coffee mugs and a pot, random art supplies, and various unsorted papers, where the professors were supposed to work, though I doubt they really stepped into that room.

As unpleasant as that sounds, when you spend many a sleepless night there working on piece after piece, just you, your IPOD and the resident creatures living in the rafters, you become attached to it and find that such a place harbors some beautiful creativity.

When Sam and I were first dating, he used to come visit me in the art barn, sometimes playing music, sometimes just talking, and, on the rare occasion, he would join me in painting. There are two memories of us while we were dating that involve art and music, and I can honestly say, they were important events to my heart falling in love. One of these is a whole other story featuring Beatles' music as per Sam Jones and one of my strangest abstract paintings (and most popular). The other memory resulted in this painting by Sam: